Vice City rises on the Miami waterfront with the county’s blessing. Good or gasp?

The fictional home of Grand Theft Auto came to real-life Miami on Tuesday as workers assembled a “Welcome to Vice City” message on the waterfront roof of Kaseya Center, giving the video game prime visibility from the air at the home of the Miami Heat.

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Miami-Dade County owns the Kaseya Center and struck a $975,000 marketing deal to let Rockstar Games pretend Miami really was Vice City with the temporary signage atop the home of the Miami Heat. Those letters were deployed by helicopter Tuesday afternoon, the launch of a promotional campaign that’s drawn local political fire for the game’s depiction of murder and violence, with players in past versions of the game able to open fire on police.

“It’s a game where police officers are killed. Pedestrians are run over,” Miami-Dade Commissioner Juan Carlos Bermudez said shortly after 1:30 a.m. Friday during a marathon budget hearing where the Kaseya Center Vice City deal was one of many flashpoints. “And we’re going to make money from a video game that glorifies it.”

The latest rollout of Grand Theft Auto — best known as GTA — is a relaunch of the Vice City version of the game, with Vice City serving as the digital stand-in for real-life Miami.

Bermudez wants the county Sheriff’s Office to receive any GTA marketing dollars. Mayor Daniella Levine Cava, whose administration negotiated the Kaseya Center deal with both Rockstar Games and the Heat, wants the proceeds from that agreement to fund the long-stalled effort to build a park behind the arena on county-owned land known as Parcel B.

That’s probably not the only funding argument to come out of the budding Vice City promotions in the run-up to the game’s official debut of Grand Theft Auto VI in November. Miami and Miami Beach have already signed marketing deals with Rockstar Games, but nothing as elaborate as what’s underway in Miami-Dade. Along with turning over the roof of the Kaseya Center, Levine Cava’s office circulated a presentation with multiple potential marketing stunts. Those include revamping a gate at the county-owned Miami International Airport to welcome passengers to Vice City and deploying replica county manholes on streets with a pretend Vice City municipal logo on them.

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The Levine Cava administration has kept under wraps most of the details about the Vice City marketing deals. The mayor signed the Kaseya Center agreement on Sept. 10, but her office only released the document Tuesday afternoon, following a Sept. 11 Miami Herald request for the document.

Commissioners also complained about being left in the dark on what’s planned for Miami-Dade’s Vice City marketing. After Miami-Dade Sheriff Rosie Cordero-Stutz joined Bermudez in condemning the county’s pursuit of Vice City promotions, multiple commissioners asked why they haven’t been asked to approve marketing agreements with Rockstar.

Commissioner Keon Hardemon, whose district includes the Kaseya Center, urged his fellow board members not to be too harsh on the Grand Theft Auto depictions of violence, saying those are the result of players making decisions to do fictional harm.

“Look, the game is as realistic as you make it,” Hardemon said. “I do believe this is going to be a marketing phenomenon.”

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